Litecoin is clearly in second place. It's technically very interesting -- scrypt is awesome -- and its value right now is much less driven by speculation than bitcoin's. When the value of bitcoin crashes again, as it inevitably will, litecoin may crash with it, or it may shoot up as people flock to it as a safer version of bitcoin.

Of course, other than toy investments, park your money in index funds. Everything else is a crapshoot.

Bitcoin is dumb for a variety of reasons, but even if you disagree with those, the fact remains that it cannot scale. It's currently capped at 10 transactions per second.. or is it even less than that? That's not enough for a small city, let alone a country or the whole planet like bitcoiners like to imagine.

If you increase the block size to accommodate, say, the average transaction volume of Visa, the blockchain will balloon out of control. If you reduce the mining time so people won't have to wait ~10 minutes or more (in increments of ~10 minutes) for their transactions to process, the nodes on slower connections won't be able to keep up and will cause the network to fork endlessly.

Decentralized currency cannot work on a reasonably usable scale. Maybe in the future, in an era of global unlimited speed, bandwidth and storage capacity, but not in the foreseeable future.

My friend for black friday bought like 15 video cards to set up a bit coin farm type operation. He's sinking a ton of money into equipment, but with just his one computer apparently he has made $7500 dollars so far so idk.

I told him there is no way bitcoin's value can sustain these levels for very long, but he thinks that he can make enough money before it crashes to justify his massive equipment purchases.

If he makes an excessive amount of money I will be slightly jealous since he asked me to go in on it with him lol.

gandalf37 wrote:My friend for black friday bought like 15 video cards to set up a bit coin farm type operation. He's sinking a ton of money into equipment, but with just his one computer apparently he has made $7500 dollars so far so idk.

Mining BTC with GPUs isn't profitable unless you get free electricity. That's why people have such hard-ons for the ASICs.

gandalf37 wrote:I told him there is no way bitcoin's value can sustain these levels for very long, but he thinks that he can make enough money before it crashes to justify his massive equipment purchases.

Maybe. There's a little bit of elasticity as the difficulty catches up to the inflated price. Ultimately though higher prices drive more mining, which increases the difficulty, which increases the power cost, which makes mining with GPUs unprofitable again.

"I like you, Glorious Godfrey! You're a shallow, precious child — the Revelationist — happy with the sweeping sound of words! But I am the Revelation! The Tiger-Force at the core of all things! When you cry out in your dreams — it is Darkseid that you see!"

Yeah it's me, my old account hasn't worked for a while and I kept intending to email someone about it or just make a new one but never got around to it. And then I did.

"I like you, Glorious Godfrey! You're a shallow, precious child — the Revelationist — happy with the sweeping sound of words! But I am the Revelation! The Tiger-Force at the core of all things! When you cry out in your dreams — it is Darkseid that you see!"